Who Will Write Our History?

Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive

Samuel D. Kassow

Publication Year: 2007

In 1940, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine
organization, code named Oyneg Shabes, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to study and document
all facets of Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would
preserve this history for posterity. As the Final Solution unfolded, although
decimated by murders and deportations, the group persevered in its work until the
spring of 1943. Of its more than 60 members, only three survived. Ringelblum and his
family perished in March 1944. But before he died, he managed to hide thousands of
documents in milk cans and tin boxes. Searchers found two of these buried caches in
1946 and 1950.

Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story
of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship and the collection
of documents to resist Nazi oppression.

Cover

contents

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me in this daunting and difficult project. David Roskies
encouraged me to begin this book and I learned a lot from many conversations
we had and from comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Havi
Ben Sasson graciously took the time to share her enormous knowledge of the
subject and read an earlier version of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to ...

Note on Language Use

How to spell the names of cities like Warsaw, Lodz, Lwów, Vilna, or Krakow
is not an easy matter to decide. In the multinational spaces of Eastern Europe,
which saw frequent changes in political sovereignty until the end of World
War II, cities were often known under different names. The Polish Lwów was
the Austrian-German Lemberg and the Ukrainian L’viv. Jews, who made up a ...

Introduction

September 18, 1946. After weeks of preparation and planning, searchers had
finally begun to dig under the rubble of Nowolipki 68 in the ruins of the
former Warsaw Ghetto. They were looking for the buried Oyneg Shabes Archive.
It was not an easy job. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oyneg Shabes—led
by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum—had included dozens of men and ...

1. From “Bichuch” to Warsaw

Was it just a coincidence that more Jewish historians came from Galicia, part
of the Hapsburg Empire, than anywhere else in Eastern Europe? Lwów produced
Meyer Balaban, Philip Friedman, and Natan Gelber. Tarnów was the
home of Isaac Schiper and Salo Baron. Rafael Mahler, Ringelblum’s lifelong
friend, and Artur Eisenbach, his future brother-in-law, grew up in the small ...

2. Borochov’s Disciple

Just six weeks before he died Ringelblum wrote a coded letter to Adolf Berman.
Berman, one of the last surviving leaders of the Left Poalei Zion in Poland,
and his wife, Basia, had been the Ringelblums’ longtime friends. That
friendship, nurtured in joint party activity before the war, became a critical
source of support in the Warsaw Ghetto. As will be seen, it was the Bermans ...

3. History for the People

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum had become
one of the most promising of the younger generation of Jewish historians in
Poland. This generation—which included Rafael Mahler, Philip Friedman,
Isaiah (Shie) Trunk, Bela Mandelsberg, and others—followed in the footsteps
of Meyer Balaban and Isaac Schiper, two older scholars who served as ...

4. Organizing the Community Self- Help and Relief

Had Ringelblum remained just a historian and high school teacher, it is
doubtful he could have organized the Oyneg Shabes Archive. To make the
archive work, Ringelblum needed a position that gave him wide contacts and
good information, as well as a certain degree of power and prestige. When the
war began, his high post in the Aleynhilf, Warsaw’s major Jewish relief organization,
is what gave him this access to people and information. The Hebrew ...

5. A Band of Comrades

The Oyneg Shabes was not just a clandestine archive; it was also a tightly knit
collective, a secret but vital component of the larger alternate community that
had developed out of the house committees and the Aleynhilf. Using the
Aleynhilf as a base, Ringelblum slowly and methodically assembled a group
of collaborators that ranged from the most prominent leaders of prewar Polish
Jewry to impoverished refugees. Of all the Jewish historians in prewar ...

6. The Different Voices of Polish Jewry

In a diary entry of May 1942 Rachel Auerbach reported that German film
crews were busy in the ghetto. This time they forced young girls and elderly
men to undress together in a Jewish ritual bath. Just a few weeks before, the
German movie makers had lined Jews up before a table loaded with food and
ordered them to eat—but not before they stepped over hungry children who ...

7. Traces of Life and Death Tex ts from the Archive

Determined to document the Jewish experience in the war, the Oyneg Shabes
collected artifacts, texts, and testimonies that reflect an ongoing tension between
prewar ideals and escalating chaos; between a yearning for collective
solidarity and rampant social fragmentation; between idealism and debasement;
between continuity and rupture—material as disparate and varied as ...

8. The Tidings of Job

The “Two and a Half Years” project was just getting into high gear when disquieting
news arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto about German massacres in the
Soviet-occupied eastern territories. As early as the summer of 1941 the underground
press in the ghetto began to report eyewitness accounts of shootings
in Slonim and the burning of a synagogue, crammed full of Jews, in ...

9. A Historian’s Final Mission

By late 1942 Ringelblum’s worst fears were coming true. As he watched the
destruction all around him, he probably realized that his chances of saving
the archive, small as they were, were still better than the odds of saving Polish
Jewry. Jewish survivors, especially returnees from the Soviet Union, might rebuild
a postwar community but the rich, vibrant Polish Jewry of prewar days ...

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